She could still smell him on the cloth, his scent strong and wild even after all this time. Some nights, it overpowered her and she almost thought she could see him. Other nights, there was just the pain. She had long ago forgotten which one to fear more. More, more, she saw threads everywhere. She could touch them now, understand them. A tangled web, ensnaring everything in its path: the future, the past, the horizon and all that lay beyond. It stretched from a past filled with horror into a future she should not have. A future lost. Stolen. Taken. Destroyed. Her brown eyes gleamed with madness, and she could not help but laugh as she stared into the void.

"Her?" Rodriguez peered upward at the black shadow that hung from the main mast. Echoing laughter danced down from the sails, mingling with the clean sounds of the sea beneath the ship. "One day, she just appeared up there, laughin' like a storm."

"You don't know where she came from?" the boy asked, twisting a thick rope around his forearm and folding it into the rigging cables.

"Nope," the older sailor replied. "Though somewhere in Vodacce's a good guess. I always figured she was city-born; I know she can read, and they don't teach women that in the countryside. If she ain't from a city, she ended up there somehow. Dionna, maybe. Chiarisa. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine. Nobody seen her show up, and she ain't never come down. Since nobody's got the guts to go up and get her, she's been there ever since."

Lightning flashed and the black-clad form leapt across the deck. The boy gasped as she caught a loose sail line, then somersaulted over twenty feet of empty air before landing with a dancer's grace on an outlying spar. Her cackles rose as she spun a near-perfect pirouette and curtsied to the indifferent sky.

"She's mad, I think," the boy said somberly, as if this was the first time anyone had ever said it.

"Mad? Oh, I think so." The other sailor nodded. "Calls herself Lucrezia. The only time I've ever heard her talk is when I'm in the crow's nest. On occasion, she'll let me get close enough to give her food, and some men says she tells them stories."

"A Vodacce Witch? Telling stories?"

Rodriguez shrugged. "S'what they say, boy."

"What's she have to say?" the young sailor asked, staring up at the figure in black that continued to swing atop the spar. She stopped, raising her hands to the wind, and screamed a high-pitched keening wail. It sent shivers down the boy's spine, but Rodriguez hardly seemed to notice.

"Love, mostly. And death. She says she's got a strand to find, one that keeps escaping her. Something about changing what has passed." Rodriguez sighed. "I think she wants to find her lover. A man named Gioseppe. She talks mostly about him, when she can't remember that he's died and left her."

"How'd he die?"

"Easy question, boy. He died when she killed him."

Sailing on the masthead high above the tossing ship, Lucrezia opened her arms to the world and laughed.